The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
Companies are often overwhelmed with customer data. Examples of customer data fields include a name, a billing address, a shipping address, an email address, and a phone number. Managing customer data can become extremely complex and dynamic due to the many changes individual customers go through over time. For example, a company's purchasing agent can change her family name upon marriage, change her email address, change her phone number, and change her employer within a relatively short period of time. In another example, a customer named Robert can also use Rob, Robby, Bob, and Bobby as his name. The use of customer data may create additional challenges, such as due to invalid email addresses, invalid phone numbers, invalid street addresses, names spelled wrong, wrong company information, wrong contact data, and duplicate customer data records with inconsistent information. When these customer data fields are multiplied by the millions of customer data records which a company may have in its data sources, and the frequency of how often this customer data is incorrect or changes is also taken into consideration, the result is that many companies have a significant data management challenge.
Furthermore, the potential for customer data challenges may increase when customer data enters a company's customer data system from the company's multiple data sources. Examples of a company's data sources include the data from interactions conducted by the company's marketing, sales, and customer service departments, which may be referred to collectively as the company's “funnel.” Such a funnel can guide or channel a large number of potential customers participating in marketing interactions to a smaller number of customers participating in sales interactions to an even smaller number of customers participating in customer service interactions.
By the very nature of enterprise application architecture and information lifecycle, data about customer interactions are distributed across different databases and applications. This distribution often leads to a company failing to sufficiently understand the overall customer interactions in support of business activities. A company's marketing department attempts to understand what the best personalized marketing message content and timing are for potential and existing customers, based on a potential customer's marketing response and case history and based on an existing customer's purchase, renewal, and case history. A company's sales department attempts to understand the engagement touch points to optimize a sales process, such as understanding legal agreements including pricing agreements for subsidiary or parent companies, and the discovery and optimization of employee and partner engagement touch points. A company's customer service department may offer call center support staff that attempt to understand customers' orders, payments, shipments, provisioning outcomes, and service levels, regardless of the customer's number of products or services. A traditional approach to resolving these challenges is through the physical instantiation of a master data management hub that stages, profiles, cleanses, enriches, matches, reconciles, and instantiates all customer related account records to create a single golden record, and then provides access to this golden record and its cross references to business applications.